Gabe Tries to Regain Supremacy

As I said in an earlier post, the last few months Norah has been making a move to be the most amusing child. Or, at least, the one providing us with the most picture/video worth moments. But this week, Gabe has made a real push to make up some lost ground.

Last weekend, my folks bought Gabe a double-ended lightsaber. I'm not going to pass judgment on this purchase yet. Gabe LOVES the toy, which isn't a surprise. And, so far, he hasn't broken anything with it (that wasn't already broken--see the second video) and he hasn't bloodied anyone's nose. So it hasn't been a disaster. But as soon as damage to person or property occurs, I'm going to pass all kinds of judgment on this purchase.

For the time being, though, it's offering Gabe LOTS of opportunities for burning off extra energy. He's also getting to work on "his moves" a quite a bit. I'm pretty sure I posted some video a few months ago, when he was in his Power Rangers phase (it really is amazing how quickly he is in and out of these phases--probably a harrowing look into his future attention span for just about everything). He was all about working on his moves, then. Well, now he's got a big lightsaber to add to those moves. Here's some pictures/video.

There were better options before I got the camera, as usual. The lightsaber comes apart to make two regular lightsabers. Libby got a picture of Gabe and Norah fighting with them in the kitchen the other day, but it was on her phone and, while cute, lacked the quality that I can really get behind.

I was able to pull the end of the lightsaber back out (it retracts slightly into itself, and, not surprisingly, that blue end was shoved in as far as possible from him jamming it into the compost). But I will be surprised if this thing lasts more than another week or two. He's beating the crap out of it.

This used to be a birdhouse. Libby made a handful of these birdhouses out of old gourds by cutting a hole into them and then hanging them up in trees. Simple but effective (I guess--I'm not sure if we ever had any birds use them. Wasps used them, but I don't know about birds). But after about a decade, the gourds broke apart. Gabe is actually helping us here by removing the remains from the tree. Standing on the wagon might not have been a great idea, but I'm getting to the point where I hate wasting my breath telling these kids about all the terrible things that can and probably will happen to them if they aren't careful. I'm beginning to think that children actually have to experience bad things to learn that something is a bad idea. Again, it's a surprise our species has lived this long when we always have to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Gabe also got his first grown-up hair cut this week. For the last almost five years Libby has been cutting his hair in the bath tub. And I think, for the most part, the results have been quite good. Here's what it started out looking like:

Little shaggy, little disheveled. I think it looks pretty good. And if it got a little longer, it would have started getting all curly, and I think his hair looks great when it's long and curly. I mean, some of that may just be jealousy on my part since the only long hair I can grow now is coming out of my nose or out of the mole on my neck.

And here's the salon.

I NEVER would have predicted I'd say this, after watching this child for the last several years, but Gabe did a great job sitting still for this.

And the end result. I don't know. I mean, it looks great and all, but it's just not the same. With the long hair he looks "impish" or maybe like a "rapscallion." With this short, groomed, producted hair, he looks "hooligany" or "frat-boy-douchey."

Or maybe it was just missing the goofy pose for the camera.

And, finally, this morning. Shortly after getting up, Gabe decided that he wanted to make . . . I don't know. Over the past month I've been portioning out a big bagful of micro-machine Star Wars sets that I collected in . . . ahem . . . college . . . ahem. Anyway, nerdiness aside, I had several little sets with ships and miniature people and all that. They were actually pretty awesome little sets. Each one was sort of a diorama of a scene from one of the original three movies (and four of them folded up into a Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2, or Stormtrooper heads, which was a pretty impressive bit of engineering). And there were a ton of ships and characters and what-not. Along with the Star Wars Squinkies that he's picked up these past few weeks, he's got quite an impressive collection of tiny little Star Wars stuff to play with.

So, somehow, he got it into his head that he wanted to create a Darth Maul set. And he wanted to make it out of cardboard. I'm guessing he pictured the end result as some sort of actual diorama looking thing. Or maybe not. Maybe he thought he could cut the cardboard and mold it to look exactly like one of the micro-machine sets. I don't know. But he asked for scissors (the adult ones, which I let him use after a few reminders to cut away from his body and so forth).

Whatever he thought he was going to do, he ended up cutting off a single flap from the box and then he decided that he was going to use the box to "scare" Norah.

And this is how he decided to do it: